Reading assessment should be completed with cognitive skills (memory and rapid automatized naming) and linguistic skills (particularly phonological domain) related to reading and learning to read. This review aims to present the importance of assessing in general and the two aspects of reading assessment in terms of screening and diagnosis. For screening and more precisely to detect children at-risk of failure in learning to read, tests of language development and phonological skills are presented. For a diagnosis in reading, we distinguish pencil-paper tests and computer-based tests. For a complete diagnosis, tests in written word recognition and in reading comprehension are presented with their limits. We conclude that assessment should be closely related to interventions as prevention or remediation.

It is a well known phenomenon that deaf children generally have many difficulties in acquiring reading and spelling in alphabetic orthographies. It is argued here that these difficulties mainly result from the fact that these children rely on lipreading to perceive spoken language and that their phonological representations are underspecified. Two lines of evidence are presented in support of this view: 1/ an analysis of how deaf children exposed to spoken language only and/or to signed language read and spell; 2/ an analysis of the effect of exposure to visual systems disambiguating lipreading on the development of phonological abilities. It is concludede that deaf children may develop reading and spelling along lines similar to those of hearing children, provided that they are exposed to a linguistic input in which all the phonological contrasts of spoken language are specified.

The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the processes involved in reading/spelling acquisition as well as possible explanations of developmental pathologies. Results obtained in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian are examined. All these languages have alphabetic spelling systems but differ as to the "transparency" of the grapheme-phoneme relationship. The results of these studies enable to separate the parameters common to different languages from those that are language-specific both in the acquisition of reading and spelling and in the genesis of dyslexia. The review of the literature also allows to sustain a strong phonological hypothesis, namely that the successes and failures specific to reading (and spelling) depend on the one hand on the transparency of the grapho-phonological relations in the writing system and, on the other hand, on the quality of the phonemic representations of the subject.

Improvement of knowledge about the cognitive mechanisms involved in skilled reading and reading acquisition contributed to the development of new tools for the assessment of reading disability. A first step of the assessment focuses on the efficacy of the global and analytic reading procedures. Evidence for disharmonious development of these procedures then requires investigating the cognitive mechanisms involved in their establishment. Phonological processing skills are then typically assessed because of their well-known impact on reading acquisition. Recent findings have shown that the integrity of another cognitive mechanism, the visual attention span, was also required for the normal development of the reading system.